An analytical hierarchy approach for studying the impact of human error, environmental factors, and equipment failure on mine accidents: a case study in India

Abstract

This paper presents a study using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to understand and prioritize the accidents that have occurred in the Indian mining industry. The data for the study was collected from accident reports submitted to the Directorate General of Mines Safety from 2011 to 2020. The accident information was divided into six categories (i.e., accidents due to ground movement, transport machinery, machinery other than transport, explosives, electricity shock, and fall-of-person). These accidents were considered alternatives in the AHP analysis. Three risk factors (i.e., environment, equipment fault, and human error) that caused the accident were considered as criteria in the AHP analysis. The safety expert carefully examined the pattern of accidents and ranked the relative importance of the alternatives with respect to each criterion. This rank was used to build the AHP model using the R programming language and the AHP library (version 0.2.8). The results revealed that the highest number of accidents occurred due to the transport machinery (0.306), followed by accidents due to ground movement (0.232), falls of individuals (0.206), machinery other than transportation (0.122), electricity (0.082), and explosives (0.048). In order to identify the contributing risk factors for each type of mining accident, the weight and the rank of the criteria were determined. The result showed that the most accidents in the six accident categories are due to human error (0.26), followed by environmental (0.25) and equipment faults. The finding of the study provides valuable insights for the mining industry to develop effective strategies to mitigate mine accidents. © The Author(s) under exclusive licence to The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden 2024.